Kelly hasn’t returned former chiefs of staff’s messages

Chief of Staff John Kelly, according to White House officials, has seen less value in the lessons of his predecessors as he tests the limits of what military order can do for Twitter-happy President Donald Trump. | Andrew Harnik/AP

When John Kelly was named White House chief of staff in July, one of his predecessors in the job, Rahm Emanuel, called his office to wish him luck and offer himself as a resource.

Bill Daley, another former chief to President Barack Obama, sent him a note with the same message: My line is open if you need anything.

Story Continued Below

Neither message was ever returned.

In his first two frenetic months on the job, the retired four-star Marine general and former homeland security secretary has had minimal contact with the small club of people who have served as gatekeepers to a president before him.

That’s somewhat unusual. Most chiefs of staff — a position that has been described by people who have survived it as daily exercise in mimicking Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream” — have generally looked to others who have been through the fire as a resource.

Emanuel, when he served as Obama’s first chief of staff, spoke frequently to Josh Bolten, who filled the role for President George W. Bush. When John Podesta served as chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, he spoke frequently with the three chiefs who preceded him in the administration, as well as to Ken Duberstein, a former chief to President Ronald Reagan.

The most reliable politics newsletter.

Sign up for POLITICO Playbook and get the latest news, every morning — in your inbox.

Email

By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Daley said he would sometimes call Jim Baker, a chief of staff under President George H.W. Bush, for advice. Even President Donald Trump’s first chief of staff, Reince Priebus, turned to Samuel Skinner, a former chief of staff to the elder President Bush, for guidance.

Kelly, according to White House officials, has seen less value in the lessons of his predecessors as he tests the limits of what military order can do for Twitter-happy Trump.

Even former Clinton chief of staff Leon Panetta, who worked with Kelly when he served as Defense Secretary and Kelly was his senior military assistant, acknowledged in an interview: “I don’t really talk to him that much. It’s a little tough when you’re not there, getting a kind of first-hand sense of exactly how things are operating.”

During the presidential transition last winter, Priebus dined at the White House with a group of former Democratic and Republican chiefs of staff, a luncheon organized by Obama’s outgoing chief, Denis McDonough, and attended by Emanuel, Podesta and about ten other members of the former chiefs club. But for Kelly, who came in mid-stream, there was no time for a bipartisan gathering.

Kelly’s relative isolation from chiefs who came before him is, on some level, a fact of his seniority and the timing of his appointment. He came into the job from the inside, after serving as a Cabinet secretary involved in major planks of Trump’s agenda, like the travel ban — a post that already gave him regular interactions with the West Wing and the president.

He is also a different mold from the civilians who have come before him. Kelly is only the second modern-day general to hold the post of chief of staff, after Alexander Haig, the army general who served as chief of staff to President Richard Nixon. But that has left him more isolated in what is considered the second most difficult job in Washington, D.C.

“I don’t think he came in cold,” Skinner said of Kelly. “Kelly knew the White House, he knew some of the players, and he knew the process generally. I’m sure he’s pretty confident he knows what needs to be done.” That’s a contrast with Priebus, he said, “who had never been in the White House, he’d never been in the process. I did talk to him several times, because they were scrambling from Day One.”

Of the half-a-dozen former chiefs POLITICO interviewed for this story, Panetta was the only one who’s had even limited contact with Kelly since he assumed the post.

A White House official said that Kelly has reached out to former chiefs, but would not provide any names from his call list. But the official also pointed to Kelly’s 40-year career managing men and women in the military, noting that he does not feel he needs much management advice from his predecessors. The official added that Kelly doesn’t necessarily see the experiences of former chiefs of staff as applicable to the unique challenges presented by the Trump presidency.

Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton said in an interview: “What civilians don’t realize is after you’ve been a company commander at every level, you have been a staff officer for a commander. As much as he is known for his battlefield exploits, he is prepared to be a staffer to a principal.”

But despite Kelly’s deep well of experience, there are still pieces of the new job that are outside of his experience, like moving a domestic policy agenda through Capitol Hill.

“In a normally functioning White House, the chief of staff is relied upon by leadership in both parties to be able to speak for the president, to negotiate, and to be able to give commitments with the expectation that you would keep your word,” said Podesta. “That means operating in a political world. As a senior military officer, that probably wasn’t where he thought his basic strength lay when he took the job.”

But more than two months in, Podesta — who served as Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair — said he isn’t surprised that he hasn’t heard from Kelly. “I probably would be at the bottom of his list,” he said.

Kelly has tried to frame himself as an apolitical aide — a facilitator for the cabinet secretaries, who he wants to run point as the main political strategists on the issues coming out of their departments, White House sources said.

Colleagues describe him as someone who reluctantly agreed to take the chief of staff job out of a sense of patriotic duty – and someone who sees his role as instilling organization and process around the president.

But former administration officials said the chief of staff post is by nature a deeply political role, whether Kelly admits it or not. And while he has some strong relationships on the Hill — it was Cotton who first recommended Kelly to former chief strategist Steve Bannon as a potential Cabinet appointee during the transition — overseeing the progress of the president’s agenda is different from overseeing U.S. Southern Command.

“He’s in an incredibly political role,” said Loren DeJonge Schulman, who served as a senior adviser to Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice. “The way the generals in the administration are talked about is that they are presumed neutral, when they’re political appointees.”

Kelly, according to White House officials, does not view his role as changing the president’s behavior or positions. Rather, he wants to simply present him with the right information. But Schulman said: “That is a very military mind-set. We expect people in that role to be playing a politically influential role.”

Two months in, Kelly has proved successful at creating a process and controlling the paper flow into the Oval Office. But Trump still has no domestic policy achievements to point to, the “palace intrigue” has escalated with stories of Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson undermining each other and Kelly’s influence has not extended to Trump’s Twitter feed, or his off-script remarks. It remains to be seen what kind of impact Kelly will have on the success of the Trump presidency.

“He’s been more involved in the immigration conversations and negotiations, in which I’ve played a key role, than Reince Priebus ever was,” Cotton said, pointing to a piece of the president’s agenda that ran through his old department of DHS. “He’s setting up conferences calls and Oval Office meetings, thinking through legislative dynamics.”

Added Panetta: “When you’re a good chief of staff, you’ve got to be aware and involved in the legislative strategy, in order to be sure the staff is properly serving the president. [Kelly’s] hope is that ultimately the president will recognize that if he’s going to be able to get anything done...he has got to do a much better job at how he presents his decisions to the American people.”